Gimme Hope Joanna by Eddie Grant was a song Nicola Comninos tried to sing to her audience without success on Morning Live. Institutions matter in design of policy, especially in economics. Institutions anchor the instrumentality of human agency over the so-called free market forces. Institutions matter when crises loom large as they do in South Africa, especially those related to energy. Free market forces are brutal and totally not free, and the naïve get beaten time and again. The free markets need institutions that intervene in their favour to help them thrive. Evidence in most cases shows such policies are meant to favour them.
In last Friday’s interview on Morning Live Comninos of Risk Management South Africa and I were asked: “Has South Africa’s corruption and lack of accountability increased risks for itself”? Our analysis was unanimous: it has. Where I fundamentally differed with Comninos was the pursuit of a good story to tell. The “South Africa is resilient” line is tired and lends us to abuse by politicians. The evidence says poverty is spreading and deepening. So the resilience line is patronising and unpatriotic in the face of wanton neglect and destruction of education by the ruling elite who leave the poor and their progeny with no hope of ever seeing a better life.
A smattering of some black people who jump through the hoops and loops of this rigged economic game are no evidence of resilience and should not be paraded to stretch the tasteless and flat “good story to tell”. This is especially distasteful when fronted by the haves. Throwing out all the context and overwhelming evidence of significantly deteriorated conditions brought about by bad policy, insults the poor who cannot afford a bath, whose children now are deprived of reading and study, who go cold and hungry. The Indlulamithi Scenarios have reported year in year out about the speed at which the disorder of the Gwara-Gwara scenario is deepening with no end in sight. Comninos’s approach was to infuse a verbal opium and try to manufacture hope in a hopeless situation.
Free markets are not free even in the giants of the so-called expert in the free world, the US. When Coca-Cola in South Africa undermined Pepsi, there was nothing free market in that equation. Pepsi could not bottle its drinks because Coca-Cola held sway on the bottling market. As a consequence, Pepsi was bottled out of South Africa, leaving the other Cola ruling the roost here. Another trick of the free-market fundamentalists was so obvious in a session we had in Magoebaskloof, Limpopo, in 1988. A Venda vendor farming tomatoes would narrate the vertical monopoly that ZZ2 tomato farmers commandeered in the industry value chain. This included trees, production of packaging materials and transport to market. ZZ2 would not sell boxes to the tomato farmers, and whatever they produced rotted in the fields. This situation persists to this day. ZZ2 tomatoes had a significant impact on the national consumer price index. This is the false free market, where presumably there are so many producers and consumers that no one can influence the price by their own actions. Good enough in Economics 101 class and not in the world of Cola and tomatoes. So the free market is not free, and institutions as champions of development can change the equation.
I have always been perplexed by the naming of the national statistics of Egypt, the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (Capmas). On my visit to Egypt, I engaged General El Gendry, the president of CAPMAS and my counterpart, about the name Capmas. He himself was a member of the Egypt Air Force before joining Capmas. He did not answer my question immediately but showed me where they battled Israel during the Suez Crisis. The name fascinated me because one of the roles of a national statistical agency is to undertake a census. According to the UN Handbook on the Principles and Recommendations for Housing and Population Censuses, a census is regarded as the biggest mobilisation in times of peace. Thus, the name Centre for Public Mobilisation and Statistics answered my question as the most appropriate by virtue of the census. How wrong I was. General El Gendry then took the time to explain the origins of the name. It was all about war. When Egypt had to prepare for war, Capmas was the source of detailed statistics such as the number of soldiers to be recruited, medical staff and material requirements. Furthermore, there were issues of security for civilians based on the count of housing units and number of people from previous censuses and population projections so the risks of war could be understood and mitigated. The Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics played a role I never imagined, though in my studies it was always mentioned that the origins of the census were related more to military might and security, instead of modern-day use, which is directed at public service and non-military operations, including in Egypt. That even fascinated me more than I had imagined. Of course the name remains and is appropriate for current circumstances.
Statistics South Africa during Covid fought a different war — producing a detailed map of vulnerability to exigencies of Covid. To this end it provided small-area statistics that provided the dimensions of poverty as determinants of vulnerability to Covid. The information could be drilled to a hundred housing units. This represents one of the foremost innovations. In the context of the existential risks South Africa faces because of the deliberate design of poor policies on energy, the deployment of the Covid vulnerability map based on the Census of 2011 remains very important.
Shutting functioning coal-fired power stations and thus plunging the country into darkness was an act of economic and social sabotage.
What then is the infrastructure by which countries harness the power of institutions especially in times of existential crisis? Governments have a rubric system, a pecking order of authority. The definitive moment when this pecking order is displayed is during the opening of parliament and the president delivers the state of the nation address (Sona). Obviously, there is always glitz and fashion, which, though peripheral to key policy issues, the media would display and fail to report on content. But if manner of dress were the only thing in town, nothing more could be reported. However, back to the gravity of institutions, especially in the context of our electricity and other crises. In the Sona, the prime expression of enjoined state power, the speaker of parliament summons the president to address the National Assembly. In his opening speech the president will acknowledge the speaker, the deputy speaker, the chairperson of national council of provinces, deputy president, the judiciary, the chief of the defence force and the governor of the Reserve Bank.
This order and manner of protocol defines the centre of state power. It allocates the apex of institutional responsibility in a democracy. By this token, for better or for worse, in health and in crisis, this institutional architecture has to organise itself as the omnipresent preserver of state longevity, especially in crisis.
South Africa faces an existential crisis driven by a deliberate force of ineptitude and poverty of economics. Shutting functioning coal-fired power stations and thus plunging the country into darkness was an act of economic and social sabotage. When the consequences of this state-led sabotage were clear, the Reserve Bank decided to run solo on its strategy for the impending risk of grid collapse. This goes to show our inability to appreciate the context of state architecture as captured in the key moment of our democracy, the Sona. Faced with this crisis these core institutions would cause a critical discourse on the threats to our constitutional democracy. Based on their joint intervention, the president would have to cause a joint seating of the National Assembly and craft a horses-for-courses strategy that enjoins these institutions to respond to the crisis, similar to Cyrus the Great of Persia’s diversity in counsel and unity in command. The president during the Sona acknowledges the speaker, the deputy speaker, the chairperson of national council of provinces, deputy president, the judiciary, the chief of the defence force and the governor of the Reserve Bank because these are core to the survival of the democracy. Institutions count, and their rubric reflects who should be around the table especially in a crisis. When there is hope, there is justification to sing Gimme Hope, but when there is none, the song adds salt to the wound.
Dr Pali Lehohla is the director of the Economic Modelling Academy, a Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg, a Research Associate at Oxford University, a board member of Institute for Economic Justice at Wits and a distinguished Alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former Statistician-General of South Africa.
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